Shiites, Kurds hail verdict as Sunnis vow revenge

A divided and violent Iraq broke into starkly disparate displays of emotion Sunday after judges in Baghdad sentenced Saddam Hussein to hang for crimes against humanity.

In Najaf, in the south, a Shiite Muslim father held aloft the tiny, shrouded remains of a young son killed long ago by Hussein's armed campaign against the country's Shiites. The father danced with his son's bones in the street among celebrating crowds, elated at the death penalty handed to the former dictator.

In the north, a Sunni Muslim man in Hussein's home city of Tikrit strapped an explosives belt around his waist and vowed to take justice for the death penalty handed to Hussein.

"Today's sentences were a death sentence on righteousness, and this makes it obligatory to take the revenge for Iraq," said Ibrahim Yahya, 29, gathered among other Sunnis jabbing rifle muzzles and pistols into the air in angry protests.

Lines of cars hung with plastic flowers snaked through the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where leaders of the country's long-oppressed Shiite majority heralded Hussein's punishment for the 1982 killings of nearly 150 of their fellow Shiites after an assassination attempt on the former Iraqi leader, who is Sunni.

"Saddam is paying the price for murdering tens of thousands of Iraqis," said Abu Sinan, 35, as he and his neighbors defied a curfew to rally in the streets of Sadr City, Baghdad's impoverished Shiite slum. "This is an unprecedented feeling of happiness. ... Nothing matches it--no festival or marriage or birth."

Iraqi police charged with enforcing a curfew did not bother to try to stop protesters in Baghdad's central Shiite neighborhood of Karadah. They waved on protesters who hooted and chanted slogans condemning Hussein.

Some shops even began to open as residents started moving through the district despite the ban on pedestrians and vehicles throughout the capital.

A police patrol rolled down the main street in the Hussein stronghold of Tikrit, 80 miles north of the capital. Instead of enforcing a curfew, it led a mob of thousands of demonstrators waving photos of Hussein and shooting AK-47 rifles into the air.

"This is an unfair verdict, and if Saddam is executed or not ... he will remain a symbol and no one can delete it--neither the Iraqi government nor the Americans," said Muhssin Ali Mohammed.

"All the Arab tribes will take revenge, and the Americans did not account for this," added a retired teacher, Mohammed Abbas.

Within hours of the verdict, unknown assailants attacked an Iraqi military convoy in downtown Tikrit and a gunfight erupted. Huddled in her home nearby, Amira Khalid, 60, pondered life without her former leader.

"We used to have special treatment under Saddam's regime. Where is the security now? Can any woman walk in the street at night? Of course not," she cried. "I ask the government, can you restore the security of Saddam?"

Kurds elated

In the northern town of Kirkuk, Kurdish taxi driver Khatab Ahmed kept his children home from school and the family gathered around the television to watch the sentencing.

"This is the fate of Saddam, who killed your uncle," Ahmed, 40, told his six children as celebratory gunfire rang out in the street. Ahmed's brother and uncle disappeared after their arrests by Hussein's security forces in the 1980s.

"I want them to see with their own eyes what happens to a ruler who oppresses his people. I think this is the best lesson to my children about respecting other human beings," Ahmed said.

In the farming town of Dujail, home to the 148 victims and many more survivors of Hussein's 1982 crackdown, clan chiefs went door to door congratulating one another. The sound of women's ululating cries rang out through a light rain.

In Dujail, the Mohammed family, who had thirsted for justice for a generation, began letting go of 24 years of pent-up anguish.

"I was always reminded of the religious saying: `A day will come for the tyrant that is worse than how he was to the vulnerable,'" said Ali Hassan Mohammed, 38, who was a teenager in 1982 when his family was rounded up by Hussein's uniformed men.

Mohammed and a brother, Ahmad, were among more than 30 members of the extended family who were arrested after assassins tried but failed to kill Hussein in Dujail on July 8, 1982.

Only many years later did the pair learn with certainty that their seven brothers had been killed by Hussein's regime.

Ali Hassan was 14 at the time. He testified during the Hussein trial that he was subjected to electric shocks and saw battered family members dumped in a building with rotting bodies in a prison camp. He remained in prison for years.

On Sunday, when the judge read Hussein's death sentence, the Mohammed house erupted. The women screamed with joy and relief.

Ali Hassan broke away from the commotion and the congratulatory phone calls and prayed. His was a prayer of thanks.